I’m excited to tell you that The Breast Cancer Diaries makes its Taiwan television debut this October.

It’s the first airing in Asia since the film was made in 2005 and I am thrilled and honored that Taiwan is joining other countries like Sweden, Israel, Canada, the United States and all of Latin America in bringing this story of help and hope to its country.

I feel like maybe with all these countries getting on board and showing my film, getting the message out, affecting lives, sharing our strength, that maybe together we can really do something about this stupid disease.

I know we hear this all the time–in advertisements from sneakers to cereals– that we can ‘make a difference’: but maybe it’s not as trite as it sounds? Maybe ‘we’ can do something to change the statistics, to take back the losses and lower the number of the all-too-many lives changed forever because of breast cancer? I mean, according to the American Association for Cancer Research, in Taiwan, breast cancer has become the leading cancer in females, with age-adjusted incidence increasing from 11.72 per 100,000 women in 1980 to 45.89 per 100,000 in 2003.

Let me state the obvious: this has to stop.

Not that an airing of The Breast Cancer Diaries can do that–don’t I wish it could. But my film should be able to enhance and highlight conversations and connections between those people encased in their own breast cancer battle in cities I’ve never visited, in a language I can’t speak, but whose turmoil and fear I can describe as well as if I were in Taipei holding the hand of a woman sitting in the oncology waiting room. At the very least The Breast Cancer Diaries shows people living five thousand miles from me that I am exactly like them in one very awful way–and somehow, that bonds us in a way that no foreign exchange program ever could.

To me, that’s worth everything.

And I’ll dare to dream that our television debut in Taiwan, located off the southeasten coast of mainland China, is just the beginning of more showings of the film across Asia in the years to come. That’s what sadly special about my film: it never gets old and it knows no geographic boundaries. New cases of breast cancer, and all the Hell that goes with them, happen every single day, all over the world.

So I thank you, Taiwan, for choosing to bring The Breast Cancer Diaries into the homes of the estimated 23.2 million people living in your country…

together, maybe we can really make a difference.